Bear in mind that anthropologists are not historians. Anthropologists are dedicated to the study of human culture, which is related to but no the same as the study of human history. Guns, Germs, and Steel chiefly argued that geography was a much stronger determining factor in the development of human societies than culture. Unsurprising that those dedicated to studying human culture weren't a fan of this framing. Contrary to the claims made in that subreddit, Diamond's high level points have been widely influential and positively received by historians. The claims made in that subreddit are not at all representative of the attitude my university history professors had towards Diamond's work.
Furthermore the claims that the book promotes a racist outlook is absurd. Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of the most anti-racist explanations to the disparities in levels of development that there is. One of the chief points of the book is that these disparities are due to being in the right place at the right time rather than racial superiority.
I think it's easiest to just call him a geographer, that really fits his work the best, and his most interesting ideas are geographical at their core.
Nonetheless, the idea that geographic determinism is mainstream among historians is not true. I'd imagine it's assigned in the early years of college because it has broad appeal across disciplines.
And over half a dozen historians at my university spoke highly of the book when I discussed it with them. I'm going to put the opinions of history professors above anonymous posters on the internet. Many mainstream historians are shifting away from the "great man" style of history that puts emphasis on culture and actions of individuals, and towards a more geographic lens of history.
The bulk of the criticism I've encountered (besides attempts to equate it with racist environmental determinism akin to Herodotus) are that it gave insufficient attention to advancements in human knowledge and understanding that changed the landscape of advantageous and disadvantageous geography. This doesn't hold much water, from what I could see in the book. In fact, one of the central points of the book is that access to the New World (which was brought by advances in maritime navigation) drastically altered the course of Western European history. Prior to that, South and East Asia were broadly speaking more developed than European societies with greater population density and larger urban centers.
If you actually read through the responses in the search I linked, you'll notice that the discussion is a little more nuanced than "it's perfect" or "it's trash". It's certainly not perfect in terms of analysis of historical evidence—there are far too few primary sources to support his claims directly, and the trends he points out can be picked apart in particular—but it still has compelling evidence that would be considered valid in other disciplines. I suspect your own professors had a more nuanced opinion than simply "spoke highly of". That doesn't sound like an academic to me.
Additionally, you should check the subreddit out. It's very aggressively moderated and many of the posters are openly credentialed professors or are actively doing graduate research. I have found it's also a great place to keep your eyes open for preprints.
I did read through the responses. The highest upvoted comment on the post "What do you think of Guns, Germs and Steel?" comes from someone that explicitly says that they are not a historian. The bulk of the criticism comes in the form of people alleging environmental determinism and the denial of human agency, which isn't actually a criticism of the book but rather a rejection of book's core claim that geography is a more decisive factor in human development than society and culture. That, and a healthy helping of people alleging western chauvinism, despite Diamond explicitly rejecting the narratives of Western social or racial superiority and pointing out that Western Europe made little contributions to Eurasian development until the mid-late 2nd millennium AD.
Sure, my conversations with professors were more nuanced: one talked about how the geographic analysis prompted them to examine history through the lens of quantifying available resources to a society and levels of urbanization. They agreed with the core theses of the book, and said that it offered good refutations to the common layman's narrative of Western cultural superiority. I could spend the rest of my evening recounting the conversations in the comments here but for the purposes of this discussion saying that they "spoke highly of" the book conveys what is necessary.
> Anthropologists are dedicated to the study of human culture, which is related to but no the same as the study of human history
This doesn’t seem quite right to me, as the child of a professional anthropologist and historian. My general impression is that the difference between anthropology vs. history (not to mention sociology & political science) has more to do with methodology than subject. Think of ethnography vs. archival research. The subject is often heavily overlapping.
They are different subjects. Anthropology is the study of human cultures and societies. Framing this as "ethnography vs. archival research" is a roundabout way of saying the same thing:
>Ethnography: The scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences.
Ethnography means you embed yourself in a group, do a bunch of interviews, etc. It is a very hands-on and 1:1 kind of method. Your definition does not really adequately describe it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography#Features_of_ethnog... (Wikipedia isn’t a perfect source here, but gives some idea.)
This is a very different approach than sitting in an archive and reading old documents or running statistical analysis on government databases or ....
But it is possible to investigate the same types of subjects using these different methods.
> these disparities are due to being in the right place at the right time rather than racial superiority
The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phenotypes were conjecture or based on poor science. Such sloppy characterizations, when combined with the seeming authoritative weight of genetics, is fodder for racism.
It's like the stereotype in the U.S. that blacks are genetically better at singing and sports. It's a "compliment" that actually serves to justify racism--the implied corollary is that to be good at those things is to be maladaptive at intellectual endeavors. There's no real scientific evidence to back it up. What "evidence" exists is far better explained by environmental factors (i.e. racism), but superficially it all seems intuitive because the entire society is constructed upon that narrative. (Actually, traits like athleticism positively correlate with intelligence, but that's irrelevant because the stereotype was flawed from inception.)
The only way to suppress such racist tendencies in humanity (to characterize and group people en masse and to rationalize post hoc our behaviors) is to be highly skeptical about proposed substantive genetic differences, particularly those which seemingly justify existing cultural or social differences. When they do exist they almost never (if at all) operate in the way we originally believed. Even recent scientific history (as in past couple of decades) is littered with hypotheses and evidence of this sort that turned out to be faulty.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about Diamond's book? Diamond not only did not attribute the course of human history to genetics or phenotypes, he has argued against such an explanation on multiple occasions. He attributes the higher development of Eurasia to geographic features: an environment more conducive to agriculture, and has a large amount of land in the latitudes conducive to building dense urban centers, among other things.
This is why the allegations of racism hold little to no water: by explaining these disparities with geography, the book is a decisive counterargument to the narrative of genetic superiority.
Would you find it racist to say that people living closer to the equator have darker skins? While there's no evidence for any complex adaptive differences between groups of people there are certainly adaptive responses to specific environmental hazards that we can see. People's levels of melonin in their skin balance skin cancer against vitamin D deficiency against folate deficiency, at least for their ancestral environment. Some groups of hunters living in the far north are harmed less by a nearly all meat diet than most people would be. Many groups living at high altitudes have higher quantities of red blood cells or similar adaptations. And since Guns, Germs, and Steel came out we've located genes influencing the immune system that trade off resistance to parasites versus resistance to contagious disease and found that Native Americans tend to have genomes that make the former trade while settled peoples in Eurasia tend to have genes pushing more in the later direction. So Jared Diamond's assertions about disease resistance have been entirely born out.
> The problem is that many of the supposed adaptive phenotypes were conjecture or based on poor science.
What phenotypes? It’s been a while since I read GGS but as far as I remember the argument of the book lies directly on the environment, not on human adaptation on that environment.
Since reading the book I’ve seen a lot of comments claiming racism on Diamonds part that to this day I can’t understand. I’ve seriously considered the possibility that there’s two different editions of the book, because I find it hard to justify any racist view using the book.
> That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
> ....
> That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners....
It's hard to pinpoint anything as boldly suspect as what he wrote early in the book, but in searching what stood out to me was his casual use of words like "evolved" and "evolution". In various parts it's ambiguous whether he perceives a genetic component to the evolution of various political societies.
I thought I remembered a part where he says some seafaring peoples score higher on spatial reasoning tests, from which he infers an evolutionary genetic adaption. But I couldn't find it.
> Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euro- pean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults.
Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.
> That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali's question.
This is part of the prologue where Diamond rejects this genetic explanation, as well as Classical environmental determinism:
> A GENETIC EXPLANATION isn't the only possible answer to Yali's question. Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.
> Although formerly popular, this type of explanation, too, fails to survive scrutiny. As we shall see, the peoples of northern Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousand years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia. In the New World the cold regions at high latitude were even more of a human backwater. The sole Native American societies to develop writing
arose in Mexico south of the Tropic of Cancer; the oldest New World pottery comes from near the equator in tropical South America; and the New World society generally considered the most advanced in art, astronomy, and other respects was the Classic Maya society of the tropical Yucatan and Guatemala in the first millennium A.D.
(some paragraphs later)
> Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.
And the answer he offer to refute the racist biological explanation is a geographic one.
> Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?
That's a direct quote where he says flat-out what he believes. It sets the tone for the entire book and the implications about how societies evolve. In the context of everything else, one could reasonably infer that he believes that Eurasians conquered the world because they genetically evolved to develop authoritarian, centralized societies where intelligence took a back seat to being a pawn in a hierarchical political machine.
But he doesn't say that explicitly, and probably doesn't even think that. His discussion of natural selection and evolution is so loose, equivocal, and as you point out even contradictory, who knows what he believes. Point being, no matter who's the good guy or bad guy, he uses very specious reasoning to build a sophisticated theory about how the world is ordered, the very kind of specious logic used in racist thinking everywhere.
His discussion of New Guineans is used to directly refute the claim that Eurasians were more advanced due to intelligence - New Guineans are just as intelligent (or more intelligent in his opinion) as Europeans, but did not develop advanced technology, thus intelligence cannot be the determining factor in technological development. He rejects intelligence as a determining factor, and spends the rest of the book after the preface explaining how influence of geography is much more convincing causal factor.
How you reach the conclusion that this reinforces racist thinking, particularly when he explicitly states that the geographic explanation he offers in Guns, Germs, and Steel is meant as a refutation to race-based explanations, is beyond me.
Furthermore the claims that the book promotes a racist outlook is absurd. Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of the most anti-racist explanations to the disparities in levels of development that there is. One of the chief points of the book is that these disparities are due to being in the right place at the right time rather than racial superiority.